Printer technology is continually advancing, resulting in commercially available printers with increasing speed, print quality features, etc. A wide range of printers are commercially available, ranging from relatively inexpensive “printing press” models with few features to more expensive “printing press” models with many features and expandable options enabling the user to print anything from a simple monochrome report to a colorful photo quality publication. Most print jobs, however, fall somewhere in between and the more expensive color printers, for example, are too expensive to maintain for printing simpler monochrome business documents. Thus, resources are wasted unnecessarily.
Additionally, print jobs often require the use of multiple printers to process large print jobs or take advantage of unique features of a printer such as photo quality color printing. Most users, however, find it extremely costly and inefficient to print, for example, a primarily monochrome print job on a color printer. Doing so is time consuming as color printers are much slower and more expensive to maintain. To process a print job that has both a monochrome portion and a color portion, the print job must be apportioned by the user and the user must send the monochrome portion to a monochrome printer and the color portion to a color printer.
Moreover, although many printers either include or can be expanded to include additional features by adding input/output (I/O) devices to a single printer, multiple printers cannot be joined to create a physical path of the paper from one printer to another. The physical path of the paper is typically referred to a “print path” or “print media path.” Thus, when more than one printer is needed to process a print job, a user must also manually transfer print media from one printer to another until the print job is completed.